Outside Mexico, virtually all of the confirmed cases have been mild. But Canada said it had recorded its first severe case, a girl in Alberta who is being treated in an intensive care unit in Edmonton. She had not been to Mexico.
The World Health Organization sent mixed signals about the potential escalation to a pandemic. Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan, in an interview with a Spanish newspaper, implied that the agency would raise its infectious disease alert level to Phase 6, the highest possible.
Other officials quickly reversed that message. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, addressing an informal session of the General Assembly, said: "If the situation remains as it is, WHO has no plan to raise the alert level to 6 at the moment."
At the WHO's daily news conference, Assistant Director-General Dr. Keiji Fukuda reaffirmed that. "We do not have any evidence that the virus has taken hold and led to community-level transmission in any other countries" other than in North America, he said.
Evidence of such sustained remission in a different region of the world is the principal criterion for raising the alert level.
Fukuda emphasized that raising the level meant only that transmission had been observed and said nothing about the virulence of the virus. "Those are two separate things," he said.
Mexican officials continued to criticize China for its restrictions on Mexican nationals. Residents of Mexico who arrive in China are being quarantined, said Jorge Guajardo, Mexico's ambassador to China. Mexican authorities said they would send a plane to China to repatriate any Mexicans who wanted to return home.
Chinese officials also quarantined a group of 29 Canadian students and a professor from the University of Montreal over the weekend, even though none of them displayed symptoms, a university spokeswoman said.
Also Monday, Carnival Cruise Lines said it would extend its ban on stops at Mexican ports for its 16 cruise ships until June 15. Such stops had previously been halted through May 11.
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thomas.maugh@latimes.com
ken.ellingwood@latimes.com
Times staff writer Rong-Gong Lin II in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
